


The Space Between

by gongjins



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Christmas, First War with Voldemort, M/M, Marauders' Era, Post-Hogwarts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 13:53:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2853185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gongjins/pseuds/gongjins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus and Sirius travel the space between each other over a treasure map that leads to the Potters for Christmas. MWPP/first war years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Space Between

**Author's Note:**

> Wolfstar feelings during Christmas, what else can I do?

The road on the map starts just outside London proper, at a dingy little diner across from an Underground station. James and Lily had invited them over for Christmas, to stay a few days and bask in the joys of friends. They’re careful about it, and it’s really only the marauders and Lily, now that the Potters are in hiding and James’ parents are gone. They’ve lost a fair few friends already and Lily and James both are worried about Harry’s safety. Remus can’t blame them, a war is no place for a newborn and definitely not when you’re a Potter and against the world. Their cabin is supposedly in the middle of the woods, but Remus is suspecting the definitives aren’t known even to them. 

They have a treasure map instead, scrawled in James’ and Lily’s own hand. The letter that came with it is teasing and light and he can hear Prongs’ lazy drawl. The one adopted when he’s pulling a prank. The letter mentions Peter there already, though Remus and Sirius stop by his house just to be sure before going on. There’s a couple ways to get in that Lily left open just for them, just for Christmas, and Peter of course took the solo, easy way. The one that didn’t say ‘map for two’ in Lily’s tight script. It doesn’t take long to realize they got the treasure map route from hell. The engine of Remus’ dads car chugs and spits like the cranky old bat himself but it keeps going anyway. 

There’d been two good graces about taking the car over the motorbike. The car was supposed to have a radio, but that had busted an hour and a half outside civilisation, long after the last streetlights winked at them with finality from the rearview mirror. The second thing had been warmth, but Sirius broke that with the window cracked and smoking like a chimney, one after another. Remus would tell him to stop, but he’s got a death grip on the wheel that comes from being bone-weary and tense against unruly, hellish weather, and the second hand nicotine is starting to help. The moon hadn’t come until the twenty-first this year, and he still hunched in pain when he thought no one was looking. Remus had wanted to take the car in part because he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to handle a tense ride up into nowhere with a freakish amount of snow for the country, but he has to admit this isn’t much better. 

“Christ,” Sirius breaks the silence in the cab ten minutes after the radio busted. It’s the 23rd of December and Sirius is taking the Lord’s name in vain. The voice of his mother is disapproving in his head, but Remus just wants to echo the sentiment considering the hell outside and the long road of silence between them.

Sirius is all pent up kinetic energy in the passenger side, and every flex of his hand when he flicks ash from a cigarette, every wash of cold air, every twitch of his muscles - the signs all point to impending overload. Remus knows he ought to curb it. Silence around Sirius means impending doom. Remus’ mind whirls trying to find a topic, but it seems all topics, like all fucks, have been given. They haven’t been alone together for too long and he’s forgotten what its like. They used to own the time alone, used to close the distance so eagerly. Now the distance feels inpenetrable. He wants Peter in the back seat to chatter with them and break the silence, to disintegrate this slow build up. He doesn’t want to talk about the war, because they talk about the war all the time. The war is all around them and Order members have been dying left and right and there are whispers of a spy in ranks. Remus doesn’t want to think about it. 

“Merlin,” Sirius exclaims this time, shivering in his leather jacket as he crushes the cigarette against his bare thumb and the opposite side of the open window and flicks the nub out into the wilds. Remus notes the change of name with a twitch of a smile on his lips. Sirius rolls the window up and the smell of nicotine floods the cab when the cold air is cut off. “This snow doesn’t stop.” 

Remus bites down on his bottom lip as he checks the rearview mirror, turning onto a bumpy road slowly. The rattling of the metal frame grates against his ears. “You could have gone earlier,” he says in a scramble for familiar ground. They’ve had this argument already. He’s not fooled by the new approach. 

“Could have driven a werewolf in the backseat,” Sirius snarls, more vicious this time because he’s tired of the argument and Remus knows it. “If that’s what you mean. Besides, Peter took the solo trip.” 

“On purpose,” he mutters under his breath with a sigh. 

He pries one hand off the wheel to grope for the map marking their nearly invisible path without looking down. It nearly crushes a cigarette pack instead, and he jerks back at the feel of the cardboard box beneath his fingers. 

Sirius turns a curious eye his way at the shuffling. “What’re you digging for?” 

“Map,” he mutters, hand springing back to the wheel as the car slips on slush and ice and tries to learn how to fly.

Whenever they fight, whenever there’s tension, it always seems that maps chart the road back to cohabitation. In school it’d been the Marauder’s map. The pride and joy and effort of brilliance. Then there was the invisible one traced in lines in Sirius’ back and scars on his. He can’t help but wonder where they lost the map between them the last few months. Burned up somewhere between secret missions and weariness by the bloody war like every other happiness. They’ve been fighting for ages and he’s tired, but they’re trapped in the cab of a legacy and Remus is trying hard not to panic. 

There’s a rustle of paper as Sirius finds it and pulls it open, flicking on the cab light. They’re not allowed to use magic on their path. Something about the special wards Lily put up. It’s inconvenient, but it’s clever. Safe. Can’t track magic on an invisible path if you aren’t using it. Can’t find the invisible path if you don’t know the starting point or have the map. Lily’s not going to take any chances, not with Harry and James to worry about. The day they take down Lily Evans - Lily Potter - is going to be the day the world ends because Lily’ll bring it all down with her. 

“Bloody hell - there’s an even smaller road up here somewhere. On the right - no, left, sorry.” Sirius blows inky strands of hair out of his face with a huff, giving the view out the window a critical view. They spend a moment in despair staring together at the way the snow blocks out the highlights. Then Remus switches on the dims, and its not much better but at least its not so full-frontal.

Remus is already antsy because the trees closed in long ago, but now they’re going to get even closer, and the winds are blowing even harder, and the car is having a hard time shuffling through the snow on this road. When he sees the road, he has to hit the breaks, because it’s hardly a road at all. More like a trail, and his car won’t fit on it.

He’s half tempted to try anyway, and let the mirrors snap off and dump the car in the woods. But he owes it to his dad to bring it back in it’s just barely serviceable condition, so he puts the car in park and twists the key in the ignition to kill the engine. The silence that had been awful before now stretches into infinity. He glances at Sirius out of the corner of his eye. The light in the cab is the only one in the world and it draws long shadows over Sirius’ sharp cheeks, hollows out his eyes and dips his lips in inky darkness. 

“Fuck,” Sirius breathes, breaking the shock of silence again. Sirius does that best. “Fucking Potters, I’m going to kill them all.” 

Remus laughs, a strangled choking sound, and pulls his scarf from the backseat. Only it isn’t his, its Sirius’ scarf, so he grabs both ends of the soft, rich material and rolls it over his companion’s neck. His eyes linger on the curve of soft lips too often twisted cruelly these days, and then to the nose that had a nearly imperceptible bump of a scar from where Sirius had gotten nicked there by shards of glass when someone cast an exploding spell on a window pane at his side. Remus remembers the scars under the clothes too. Long and thin as parchment. 

“How long do we walk?” He asks to be distracting, and they bend their heads over the map like the old days. 

“A kilometer?” Sirius guesses, tracing the path through the woods. “To the end of the line.” 

Remus nods, working his jaw as he twists his threadbare scarf around his neck and pulls his coat closer around him, binding it up. He pulls on patched gloves and reaches across to click open the glove compartment for the torch. He prays for working batteries, and sighs victoriously when it gives a small flicker before shining right in both their eyes. 

Sirius bites out another curse, but Remus stows his wand, keys, and grabs his bag from the backseat. He pushes the door open and steps out resolutely into the cold, frigid wind, and reaches back inside to click out the light and push the lock down before slamming the door shut. Sirius scrambles to follow him, rounding the car and skirting close to Remus with a huff of breath.

“I wish I could go Padfoot,” he mutters, pulling his jacket closer. 

Remus analyzes it, and him for a moment in the darkness, and flicks the torch between them as they step through knee-deep snowdrifts together. Sirius isn’t prepared for cold and Remus can tell from the way he braves it. His clothes are better made and not as threadbare, but it’s hard to tell who’ll end up catching their death first in this. It takes promptly two seconds for the snow to get into his boots, and he really hopes frostbite doesn’t become a part of this adventure. 

“Ta, Lily,” he murmurs softly, just under the bellow of cold wind slapping his cheeks raw. 

Sirius hears him anyway and barks out a bitter laugh. He steps closer, so close their legs nearly tangle together. Remus grips his elbow for a moment. Sirius tenses, then relaxes, huffing at his own reaction like he’s ashamed of it. He wonders if his ears are going red like they’d done in school. But they’re probably red anyway from the cold. 

“I’m going to kill Prongs for marrying such a smart lady. No one else would make you go through hell and back to celebrate fucking Christmas. This is like a trial of bloody fire.” Sirius speaking hotly makes Remus grin against his scarf, and he wobbles forward, step by step through frozen wasteland. 

Numbness slowly starts to take over his body, but each step they take, the closer Sirius gets until they really are arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder, and every time Sirius moves he catches a whiff of nicotine and cold sweat, despite the winds buffeting them, tossing them around. 

“In a way, I guess it’s only right.” He shivers. “Voldemort himself wouldn’t go through this.” 

By the time they get to the end of the trail, they’re nearly huddling together. Remus’ coat is nothing against the forces of nature, and his heart is pounding his his chest. Under the hand that’s tucked itself around Sirius’ shoulders, he can feel his doing the same. Its so cold all he can think about is kissing him breathless and making warmth between them like they used to, when they had warmth to spare like better days. The urge is so vibrant and quick to fill him up that he suspects foul play. 

But then the thought is gone and he’s flashing the torch around the woods, looking for a sign. Then he flickers it back to the map Sirius is fumbling with, pulling open with frozen fingers. He sees Sirius without gloves and swears loudly for not noticing before they left the car. 

“Pads,” he says it so softly that he makes Sirius look up immediately. Hair falls over his face, scatters from the wind. “Where are your gloves?” 

He knows Sirius is glaring and he doesn’t have to see it, but the light enunciates the crush of his eyebrows when they pull together, and the curve of his lips when he frowns. Sirius opens his mouth to snap, but Remus grabs the nearest hand, the one that had been twining slowly through his arm, pulling closer and closer. He envelopes his hand in his and Sirius slowly wiggles his fingers into his glove to share the warmth. The hand is so cold it feels like ice, but even with that he still feels a victorious thrill run up his spine. The hand holding the map is shaking, and Remus grabs the parchment, tucking the torch into his mouth. 

“Don’t do that,” Sirius chides, sucking in an audible breath. “What if it blows up on you?” 

Remus snorts, nearly ejecting the light, and rolls his eyes. Sirius can ride a motorcycle just fine but put a flashlight in your mouth and you might blow your own head off. He squeezes their joined hands and focuses on the map, biting back the retort. X marks the spot, it reads in James Potter’s scrawl, and he resists the urge to huff. They’re right over the X, or where he’d expect it to be. As he watches, the scrawl turns into a knobby tree, and that knobby tree turns into a heart. 

“What?” Sirius scowls, because he too was watching it, and as the map repeats itself, he crumbles the corner of the paper into a fist. Remus lets him ball it up because it frees his hand again, and he checks the trees until he finds a knobbly one. It doesn’t look like a heart, but it’s old and knotted and precisely the shape the inked lines had made before transfiguring. 

He pulls Sirius with him and shines the light dubiously around it. There’re no hearts, though the tweaking, unfurling secret is tell-tale of the Marauders Map technique. It’s a password, but there’s no secret door to say “Speak heart and enter” here. 

He glances at Sirius, who raises a hand and knocks on the tree. The wind howls through the bare branches and almost sounds like laughter. “Fuck,” Sirius enunciates, running his hand through his hair and tugging at it in distress. He gives Remus a look. “I love you?” he tries, and a burning, liquid fire tugs at his heart. Sirius always says his downfall is thinking too much about little things. Sirius can turn moody on a dime, but his words shoot arrows like his eyes shoot silver bullets that pierce straight through Remus. He says I love you like a question, but without hesitation. The words Remus knows are true get stuck in his throat, lodged and stuck fast. In retaliation he squeezes Sirius’s hand instead. 

“Do you?” He murmurs, honestly, squinting away through the trees, focusing on the shadows that play against he flicker of their light. Sirius shrugs, giving a grin that he remembers from months - years - together. “Still?” 

Chaos wrecked a lot of things. In a better light, he might be able to see what the war’d been doing to Sirius, who acted like it was all good. It wasn’t, because Sirius was even more of a cannon than ever before. It wasn’t, because silence made Sirius smoke like a chimney. It wasn’t, because Sirius showed up at his flat, every month, helped him with the full, and then disappeared. Sirius wasn’t okay and Remus wasn’t either, but war did that to you. Even the secret wars. Remus speaks in secrets kept and words not spoken and always has done. He hopes - as he always has hoped - that Sirius understands what he doesn't say, that he knows the words trapped between his teeth and their bodies.

“I love you too,” he breathes, and when nothing happens after an instant of staring at him, he swoops in and catches his bottom lip, pressing into a kiss that’s partially open mouthed because Sirius had just opened his mouth to laugh. They’re cold and wet and soggy and miserable, and when they part it’s to a groan of branches. The tree opens and there’s the portkey they went through hell and back to get to. They grab it together with their joined hands, shoulder to shoulder, temple pressed against wet, chilly temple. As far as kisses go, it's definitely the lowest on the thermometer. 

“James _sodding_ Potter I am going to have your fucking head!” Sirius roars as they tumble onto the welcome mat just inside the Potters’ home of the week. Remus fumbles over a pair of boots and crashes back into the corner, pulling Sirius with him. A mischievous glint touches the corner of those grey eyes and Sirius is kissing him again, pulling them both upright by his scarf. Sirius tastes like nicotine and cold and his nose is dripping. It's not the best kiss but it reminds Remus of Hogwarts, of magic, of warming spells on freezing northern nights. 

Remus takes a deep breath when they part, slowly and through the nose. Spices, home-brewed pumpkin juice, honey roasted ham all overwhelm him. There are familiar peals of laughter from the living room and James shouts a greeting. They both grin at one another, finally, and the tension leaks out of their shoulders as they toe off their shoes together and leave them dripping at the door. Harry gives a happy baby shriek as Sirius yanks him into the room, into the warmth of home that only the Potters bring. Remus’ heart warms over, soaking in the joy of the moment, wishing it would last for eternity.


End file.
